Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday January 08, 2008 @05:04PM
from the look-ma-no-hands dept.

Gregor Stipicic writes "Cars that drive themselves — even parking at their destination — could be ready for sale within a decade, General Motors Corp. executives say. 'This is not science fiction,' Larry Burns, GM's vice president for research and development, said in a recent interview. GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies. The first use likely would be on highways; people would have the option to choose a driverless mode while they still would control the vehicle on local streets, Burns said. He said the company plans to test driverless car technology by 2015 and have cars on the road around 2018."

***Good lord, what if the autobot is localized? I mean, how much worse would the driving be if it was a BostonBot(tm)?***

What's the problem? You just need a sensor and a little code that can juggle the special factors involved in Boston driving -- Relative Vehicle Size, Number of dents, Condition of the paintjob. Vehicle with the least to lose in a collision has the right of way. You won't even notice that a robot is driving.

In fact, judging from most of the computer controlled gadgets around here,

Computer drives your car, leaving YOU free to man the turret. If Phone-y McSoccerMom gets too close, Blast her with a holosonic warning, "quit emailing movies of jr. or quit putting on makeup. Better yet, Both! Also, pay attention to the road. Unsevered necks don't grow on trees, you know." Then take a picture on your iiiPhone and email it to traffic control.

Further, what makes you think you can react to road dangers faster than a radar-equipped mesh-networking auto-bot?

Why do they need a new chip for this? There are already perfectly good navigation algorithms. They should license use of the Roomba's navigation system from iRobot and install that on cars. Sure, they'll need front bumper sensors and a cliff sensor, but that's pretty trivial.

* Make truckers obsolete
* Allow dropoff/pickup of children without you being present
* Allow pickup of groceries or other goods without you being present
* Make it so you don't need parking near your destination (vehicle can leave, park elsewhere, and return later)
* Greatly increase throughput (autoconvoying, reduction of drag, traffic-aware route scheduling, reduction of human error)
* More green space for a given amount of throughput (same)
* Greatly increase speeds (same)
* Greatly decrease fuel or energy consumed at a given speed (same), helping the environment.
* Decrease costs to consumers (as above) and thus opens up wider travel opportunities/deurbanization.
* Facilitate better integration of the vehicle and the road (example: bridges that know how much capacity they can support and vehicles that know how much they weigh so that they can be built lighter (and thus cheaper) while still being safe by never routing too much weight to be crossing a given bridge at once)
* No speeding tickets
* No drunk drivers
* No need to pay attention to the road -- but those who like to drive could still offroad, go to tracks, etc.
* Greater response time of vehicle and built-in system-aware hardware eases transition to new technologies, such as inductrac maglev roads, powered roads to recharge electric vehicles, or whatnot.
** Above technologies further increase speed, decrease energy consumption, boost economy, and decrease cost to consumers
* Greatly boost the economy (all of the above)

* Completely kill the fun and independence of the open road for human fun. - No more jumping on your motorcycle for an adventure on the open road. The "iron butt" will become a thing of the past. One more chink out of the independent spirit.

No need to pay attention to the road -- but those who like to drive could still offroad, go to tracks, etc.

I fully support your right to go have fun driving your vehicle if that's what floats your boat. You don't, however, have a fundamental right to use something constructed by lots of my taxpayer dollars (the public road system) as your personal playground and put me in unnecessary risk while on it. In such a future, if you wanted to drive for fun, you could easily go drive somewhere that's for people who want to drive for fun; however, our tax dollars weren't collected to build you a racetrack.

No need to pay attention to the road -- but those who like to drive could still offroad, go to tracks, etc.

I fully support your right to go have fun driving your vehicle if that's what floats your boat. You don't, however, have a fundamental right to use something constructed by lots of my taxpayer dollars (the public road system) as your personal playground and put me in unnecessary risk while on it. In such a future, if you wanted to drive for fun, you could easily go drive somewhere that's for people who want to drive for fun; however, our tax dollars weren't collected to build you a racetrack.

Excuse me but I pay a fortune to use the roads and should have the right to spend my normal 30-40 hours a week on the roads I paid for without inexpirienced idiots putting me in danger.

The people who cause most accidents arnt truck drivers, taxis or couriers.

Its the person driving to the shops for their weekly shopping or picking their kids of from school that pull out in front of other vehicles on the highway or stall at the lights. These people often spend less than 20hours a week on the road and dont dr

Excuse me but I pay a fortune to use the roads and should have the right to spend my normal 30-40 hours a week on the roads I paid for without inexpirienced idiots putting me in danger.

You know, you're right. You're right! You pay for it, you should be able to do whatever the heck you want with it. Speaking of that, I should go to an Air Force base and take a free ride on a jet fighter. Hey, I'm paying for it, right? Who cares what the "intent" of the program is. It's all about what "I want" to do with the program, right? Who cares whether the "intent" of the transportation budget is to move people and goods. If you want to use it for your own personal needs, screw the purpose of the transportation budget (moving people and goods), right?

The people who cause most accidents arnt truck drivers, taxis or couriers.

But they *do* cause accidents. Drunk drivers only cause ~40% of accidents [car-accidents.com]. ~42,000 people die per year in auto accidents. Put 9-11, our troops lost in Iraq, and all of those sorts of things in perspective: 42,000 *per year*. Car accidents are the *leading cause of death* for people between ages 6 and 27. 394,000 large trucks were involved in crashes in 1999. 5,203 people died and 127,000 were injured. The economic damage of the accidents was a staggering $150 billion, just in 1999. Let's put that into perspective: Hurricane Katrina did only $81 billion.

This is not something trivial. You not only want the American public to pay for your entertainment, pay *huge amounts of money* for your entertainment, but you want to keep us in a system that injures half a million people a year, kills several tens of thousands per year, and does almost twice the economic damage as Hurricane Katrina each year. For your entertainment. Pardon me if I'm a wee bit hostile to the notion.

I know I've certainly been sitting around on a lazy summer evening and decided to go for a nice drive in the country with my wife, even going so far as to drive in a random direction to see what there is to uncover, several times even making a whole weekend out of the randomness of it. There's lots of great things out there to discover which a computer-controlled car will never find.

What, you don't think you'll be able to tell the computer where you want to go? Or give it commands like "turn left up ahead" or "stop here"? Personally I'd love to be able to really look at the scenery on those country drives rather than dividing my attention between it and the road, and then at the end of the day just tell the car "home, James" and sit back and snooze.

Hell, they could even put in a steering wheel and pedals so that you think you're in control, but the computer just takes those inputs as suggestions.

That's something I would gladly give up if it meant not sitting in traffic for hours because all the moron drivers are ogling the accident on the other side of the freeway. Automated driving will decrease accidents, travel time, and save on gas. Imagine if you had to pay only $10/month on insurance, and you could drink yourself silly at the bar and have your car drive you home. Sure, going 100mph on the interstate in Arizona is fun, but traffic is not.

If you're truly willing to give things up, then you can have what you want. Figure out a way to get a job where you can work from home. Sell the car. Move somewhere with really cheap housing where you can walk to the grocery store. It sounds like I'm being glib, but I'm dead serious. Do it.

I did it. My wife and I both took 50% pay cuts to find work at home jobs. We sold one car and used it to pay off the other. We fill up our remaining car about once every 2 months or so. We had many expenses before that we no longer have, including about $150 USD/mo in toll roads and about $250 USD/mo in gas, and our car insurance is super cheap now with 1 car fully paid off instead of 2 cars. Plus, we both recovered about 2 hours per day each on commute times, which we now use to enjoy our happier less stressful lives.

Seriously-- if you're honestly willing to make sacrifices to not sit in traffic, then do it. You're in charge of your life, right?

Rail, light rail, and busses simply are not general purpose solutions.

* Not door-to-door service. Rules out the weak, the disabled, many of the elderly, many of the young (safety), and the vast throngs of able-bodied people who, whether you think the reason is justified or not, simply don't want to walk a dozen blocks to make all of their connections every day because they:
* Have "better things to do" than spend an extra 5-10 minutes each way walking several blocks, or
* "Don't want to" walk several blocks
* Need to be transporting goods (dry cleaning, groceries, etc) long distances by hand. I'm in good shape, but even I'd hate to haul, say, a 40 pound bag of water softener salt plus a couple gallons of milk, a few quarts of juice, and all of the other stuff I might happen to pick up at a grocery store.
* Greatly increased travel time. I can drive to the grocery store in three minutes, but it'd take about an hour get there via bus -- at peak service times. Even if they 10xed funding to make busses run 10 times as often, it'd still take three times as long to get there. And this excludes the aforementioned time to walk to the bus stop. Busses, light rail, and rail are simply a poor fit for going from specifically point A to specifically point B. They do great on long stretches, but simply can't cater to the individual needs of their many passengers.
* Has economic penalties (greatly increased transit time is not free to an economy)
* Has leisure time penalties (as above)
* Lacks individualism (something Americans tend to prize)
* Lacks the ability to leave things of yours in a vehicle.
* Lacks the ability to maintain (or not maintain) the vehicle in the shape you find acceptable, or to modify it to your liking
* Lacks room for transporting goods -- both everyday goods (groceries, dry cleaning, etc) and non-everyday goods (a refrigerator, a desk, etc). Especially important on "goods" that aren't allowed to be transported in public transport -- pets, dangerous chemicals, etc.
* Requires a much greater degree of pre-planning for trips to get your route and timing down.
* Has serious time penalties if you miss a connection.
* Lateness (above) has serious economic and leisure-time penalties.
* Forces people to be in close proximity with other people (laugh if you want, but the hypochondriacs, agoraphobes, racists, and vast throngs of people who merely want to be left alone won't be laughing)
* Doesn't make use of our vast amount of existing infrastructure (only applies to rail and light rail, not busses)

The overwhelming majority simply won't vote for any candidate who would eliminate personal transportation for public, and any transportation proposal needs to deal with the reality that there are many, many reasons, both good and bad, that it's not a general purpose solution.

This line cracked me up -- since those four groups are the primary users of public transportation

Not around here. Around here, the primary users are the able-bodied poor.

Those are the groups that are the least likely to a) be capable of driving, and b) be able to afford the cost of owning, maintaining, insuring, and fueling a vehicle.

And, more importantly, walking several blocks to the nearest bus stop multiple times on each trip. I have a good friend with muscular dystrophy. She drives a car. The concept of her walking everywhere to catch busses, especially in winter, is almost laughably bad.

Healthy adults are the people who take transit the least, for the simple reason that they're the ones that can afford cars and have both the mental acumen and physical health necessary to operate them.

Tell that to gardeners, construction workers, factory workers, and all other "manual laborers". Tell them how wealthy they are. Go on. Because, at least around here, those are the sort of people you see on the bus. Them and students.

That's what an iPod and a book are for.

How nice for you that this is all you need to be unaware of everyone else around you.

Even the most obnoxious of the homeless insane wont try to talk to someone protected by such an overpowering barrier of leave-me-the-fuck-alone.

Funny, because I've had, on multiple occasions, homeless insane (or at least seemingly homeless and insane) people carry on one-sided conversations with me for my entire ride on the bus while I'm programming on my laptop the hole time, and I don't even ride it that often.

The grocery is that close, but you can't walk?

I don't know about you, but I don't exactly feel like needlessly losing 40 minutes of my day a twice a week and carrying back half a dozen bags of groceries weighing dozens of pounds total (sometimes more) in my arms. Or should I tow a little red wagon with me? Any more annoyances you'd like to pile onto my life for no particular reason?

that means your grocery store is at most 1.5 miles away. A reasonably healthy person can walk that in about 15 minutes.

It's actually 1.3 miles, 4 minutes drive, according to google

I'm sorry but 6 miles per hour is not a "walk". That's jogging. So, now what am I to picture -- you want me to jog with a dozen bags of groceries in my arm? What's next -- do you want me to juggle and play harmonica at the same time?

Anyone who's actually used public transportation at all (as opposed to the people who go around making up bullshit about how unsuited it is for everyone except healthy adults) knows that for short trips, it's usually easier to walk.

Um, excuse me, but I used to ride the bus daily. Don't lecture me about "anyone who's actually used public transportation".

Youths generally can't afford cars, so they depend on public transit.

I said the "young". As in children. As in "American parents don't typically want their kids riding alone on a bus and would rather just drop them off somewhere".

The elderly frequently can't afford cars and are often incapable of driving, so they depend on public transit.

If they're incapable of driving, I bet walking a dozen blocks with groceries in their arms is a blast, isn't it?

Not owning a car is a sign of being poor, not elderly.

The disabled are one of the lowest income groups in any society, especially American society with its disdain for social services. Do you really think that they can afford cars?

My friend Cathy has one. It's a junker probably worth less than a thousand dollars, but it drives just fine. It's fitted with hand controls so she can run it properly. Before she was able to get that car, she was part of a car co-op. Again, think for a second: person who can hardly walk, and you want her to *carry things* for *several blocks* each way to get to a bus stop? That's positively ludicrous.

Not to mention the fact that many disabilities directly prevent people from driving.

As a motorcycle owner, I'd trust a computer controlled cage much more than a human controlled one.Humans make a lot of mistakes including the stupid excuses "I didn't see you". With computer controlled stuff, the software will *see* everything down to a given size all the time. It doesn't get distracted or starts the 'stare into oblivions', both of which result in the same scenario.

Cars and SUVs and trucks are the largest obstacle to safety for cyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists. Remove the recklessnes

GM needs to come out with some crazy stuff like this soon because they're failing in their core products. They obviously can no longer compete when it comes to ordinary cars. So they need something extra-ordinary to sell or they won't exist for very long.

GM needs to come out with some crazy stuff like this soon because they're failing in their core products. They obviously can no longer compete when it comes to ordinary cars. So they need something extra-ordinary to sell or they won't exist for very long.

No, they need to just throw in the towel if they can't compete with their core product, because if they can't even do plain old cars decently, they're certainly not going to succeed at anything more grandiose.

Eventually, GOOG will use it's huge market cap to move in to the Auto space. They will begin offering free, advertising-sponsored cars. They will monitor your driving habits and steer you near relevant businesses, showing ads for the businesses in the HUD.

I'm pretty sure the encylopedias that my parents had (published in the late 70s) mentioned driverless cars as something coming in the near future. So forgive me if I'm a bit skeptical on this. I still want my flying car!

The technology not only exists for autonomous cars, but have been implemented in various forms already. California made a special HOV lane 10 years ago [wikipedia.org] that allowed specially equipped cars to drive themselves in those lanes close to each other. The project was apparently abandoned due to political pressure, not due to technical reasons.

There will not be a mass-produced flying car though. That simply requires too much energy and we have a large enough energy problem as it is. Unless you want to use a deri

There will not be a mass-produced flying car though. That simply requires too much energy and we have a large enough energy problem as it is. Unless you want to use a derigible there is drag induced just by the act of flying which causes an additional amount of energy to be consumed as opposed to staying on the ground.

You don't read enough. There already exists a perfectly good sky car [moller.com]. 20mpg on pure, clean-burning ethanol, and completely safe computerized navigation and flight control. And it's quiet. And it goes well over 200mph, and can take off and land vertically, right in your yard. I can't believe you don't know about this vehicle. It's even red!

...that someone will have to come up with maps that are accurate? I don't mean ones that have pinpoint accuracy on the locations of roads, but thoroughfares with special conditions. I'd hate to riding in a car in autopilot that decided it could turn the wrong way down a one way street because the map data didn't show it.

I think the cars can't just rely on map data - they need to "see" as well. That means people, detour signs, construction work, "road closed" etc. There will also probably need to be a standard "local update" system where the road crews can put in a beacon that broadcasts local updated information for the area.

Of course, security on all this stuff needs to be tight - imagine if some guy hacks his car to spit out messages like "I'm an ambulance, get out of the way!"

Imagine if some guy paints his van white and puts flashing lights on top and buys a siren... as for your other point, this will be highway-only at first, which is easy on those long stretches of cross-country highway. I wouldn't expect something to navigate complicated interchange lanes or anything, but it would be nice to hit the "drive control" and have it be able to follow the lines around a shallow turn or hold the car straight while I unwrap my cheeseburger.

Funny, I went back to TFA to see if I missed something. Doing a search on "sign" doesn't return any results (other than being part of the word significant). Are you finding this in another related article? Or are implying that this will be part of cars being able to "talk with highway systems?"

There's a high degree of confidence in presuming that some form of roadway infrastructure improvements will be necessary, but the details didn't come through in the linked article, as far as I can tell. And con

I will remain pseudonymous, but I will say that my current area of research (I am a graduate student) is tangentially related to this field, related enough that I've looked into trying to convince GM to give me funding (so far nothing has materialized). Specifically my research looks deals with programming language design (e.g., making less-than-Turing-complete-but-still-useful programming languages structured in useful ways) to aid in static analysis. The aim is at safety-critical code (nuclear power plant code, industrial controller code, automotive software) such that you can say "barring hardware failure, this code is 100% guaranteed to meet hard realtime constraints", etc.

Anyway, at least publicly, GM is probably the most impressive car company in terms of researching these sorts of things. I feel kind of bad for GM. I hear they're selling terribly and are even selling at a loss on many cars, but their research department really is something impressive. Maybe they're a little bit Microsoft-ish in that their research department is heavily insulated from the rest of the company, I don't know. But GM is doing a lot of cool stuff and funding a lot of cool stuff with regards to "correct" software.

If it were some other random company, I would probably roll my eyes and say "oh they'll probably just test it really really heavily and then tell us that it works", but more than most companies, I trust GM to develop cool technology (such as novel static analysis techniques) to get this to work. Their R&D [gm.com] is active in a lot of areas, 99% I'm sure will never amount to anything, but I wouldn't doubt it if they could get the technology together to get auto-driving cars in 10 years.

Disclaimer: as I mentioned before, my efforts to get GM funding are still unsuccessful, and consequently I'm not on GM payroll in any imaginable way. I don't even drive a GM car (or any car). In fact their cars look kind of lame in general, but their R&D department in Cool.

GM's problem stems from the fact that they've had since the oil embargos in the 70's to improve their auto's milage. No intelligent person can argue successfully that GM's engines aren't a lot more efficient than they used to be. It's that they've wasted all of these efficiency gains on increasing horsepower to drive heavier cars more quickly.

GM's had 30 years to bring fuel efficiency & milage to the forefront of their goals. I have no sympathy for its demise.

So, when a driverless car runs a red light, who gets the ticket? The owner? The manufacturer? The software company? Hell, they have automated machines that issue red light tickets now, so will one pile of metal and software issue the ticket to the other? Will the machines develop their own monetary system, will driverless cars figure out hacks to avoid the tickets, and will the robot machines have their own jails and prisons? Capital punishment = execution by power surge or by fatal software virus? This smacks too much of a bad Twilight Zone episode.

Listen, if done correctly there will be no need for red lights (at least not for cars,) as they would all be communicating with other cars within some defined radius (1km?) in that case all cars would 'know' what the other cars are doing and the traffic could be controlled in totality thus negating the reason for such implements as the street lights. Of-course road signs would still exist, but they would have to communicate with the cars to control the particular conditions on the road.In any case GM is wr

I'm not an attorney (I'm also not an acronym kinda guy) - But it seems by assuming control of the car GM would also be assuming responsibility for the occupants of the vehicle and any other involved in a collision.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

It seems to me the only way this technology ever winds up on the road is if the owner of the car signs a waver at the car dealership to hold GM harmless and assume all responsibility for driverless mode accidents.

That's a very important point, and I hope more people take note of what you said. The primary barriers to this kind of thing are political, not technological. If I injure or kill someone through my driving, what's the most you could hope to sue me for? Maybe a million dollars. But if the car was self-driving, well hey, that's a company with deep pockets. You could sue me for a lot more!

Now who can handle the insurance policy on that?

Then, of course, inane regulation.

Never mind that these will be safer and less obstructive than 95% of drivers. Never mind that they'll end the problem of drunk driving. Never mind that they will massively increase productivity. Everyone has to get their piece.

All things considered, if the tech works as well as GM is hoping for, then accidents would befar, FAR fewer than what we see today. Owning a self-drive capable car might even LOWER yourinsurance payments as you're taking the human out of the equation. Think about what causes mostaccidents. Hardware failure ? Um. . no.

Usually it's stupidity on the drivers part. Driving too fast, ( or too slow in the wrong lane )didn't see the vehicle next to them, drunk, racing, rubbernecking, on the phone, whatever.Remove the driver from the equation and 99% of the traffic fatalities will probably go away.

Once the tech arrives, it would probably take 5-10 years to get the changeover completed. Oncethat happens, most of the accidents and the reasons behind them would vanish. Talk all you wish onyour phone. Eat your breakfast and rubberneck till you are blue in the face. The computer won't runthe light, blow the stopsign or try to race the idiot next to you. Freeway traffic will likely beself-drive ONLY.

Hell, they may even RAISE the speed limits. The ones we have now have to factor in the idiotequation. Remove the human problem and higher speeds navigated via computer will be just as safe( if not safer ) than the lower ones driven by their flesh and blood counterparts.the lower ones.

With my drive testing the limits of my sanity on a daily basis ( ~80 miles roundtrip to the officethrough the worst traffic Houston has to offer ) I'll be first in line if / when this tech becomesavailable.

It ends the problem of drunk driving only if the automated system is 100% in control portal-to-portal and 100% reliable portal-to-portal. The drunk will be making the initial decision to take to the roads.

Yes, which is why the problem is greatly curtailed -- drunk merely has to be able to say, "God damn I'm wasted. Car, take me home." I'm willing to bet that most drunk people who get in a car will gladly take this option in preference to risking a DUI.

I work for a company[1] that (among other automation projects) is working on driverless cars. Interestingly, the biggest problems we face are not those of perception (though there's more work to do there as well), but of the cost of the necessary sensors / processing power. We have a car now that can drive up to 70 mph safely (detecting obstacles, other traffic, etc) and we think we can get it up to 100 mph. However, it has a rack of four powerful servers where the back seats used to be and a price tag of over $750,000 - just for parts; labor is extra.

With the speed with which processing power and sensors become cheaper and more widely available, I think 10 years is definitely attainable. The tech is here, most of the problems are solved, we just have to wait for the price point to come down.

[1] I was going to put our URL here, but the IT dept will kill me if the servers get/.ed.;)

I'd assume the tech works under ideal driving conditions, but what about the unforseen stuff that comes up in day to day driving? Can the car detect an icy patch on the upcoming corner? Will it swerve violently to avoid an empty cardboard box blowing across the highway? Will it still work around radar jammers? Technically illegal, but I'm willing to bet there's still a fair number of them out there. How stable is the processing unit?

Personally, I'll believe it when I see it, and even then I think I'll be

I'd assume the tech works under ideal driving conditions, but what about the unforseen stuff that comes up in day to day driving?

I'd trust a computer over most drivers. Traffic engineers model traffic off completely unintelligent fluid dynamics. And they have to adjust because humans are less efficient that particles (yes, I'm saying that the average driver is more stupid than a molecule of air). With a computer driving, conditions that require slowing down ahead will result in slowing before you have

Actually, a driverless car might be just in time for a lot of the Baby Boomer generation as they get into their 60's and 70's, just as their mounting health problems take their toll on driving skills. Accident rates tend to be lowest for drivers in their 40's and 50's, when mature judgment backed by decades of experience more than compensate for slower reaction times and loss of motor skills they had in their youth. Accident rates start rising again as people get on into their 60's and the effects of decrea

Between texting, eating, putting on makeup, smoking, futzing with the radio, surfing the Internet for the nearest Burger Doodle, and so many other things to do in the car, driving is SUCH a distraction.

Even if the technical issues were all resolved (which is not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination), what about the legal and insurance issues? Until the insurance companies jump on the bandwagon, this will go nowhere.

It's not like ALL the cars on the road will be driverless. Who is responsible for a crash that occurs while you aren't driving and are reading or asleep (why else would you want a driverless car)?

They might have better luck putting driverless "taxis" in crowded downtown areas where traffic moves slowly - that would reduce the damage and injuries associated with accidents at higher speeds.

I don't think it would work to well in crowded downtown areas either. Imagine a mix of driverless and regular cars. The driverless cars will have to follow a, let's call it, fully legal driving plan. That means not taking chances and allways err on the safe side but that makes them vulnerable to "bullying" from regular drivers that can force the driverless car to yield. They would risk to become more or less a second-class citizen in that traffic. That type of vulnerability would me much smaller outside city traffic.

But I do agree fully with you that legal/insurance-problem might be the biggest dealbreaker.

How many times have heard the story that technology X is only a decade away, then another 10 years later Technology X is ust another decade away?In my book, if you an't roll something out within 18 months, it's vapor. Talking about something you think is a decade away is just lip service clearly trying to generate some PR and drve up stock a few cents for the day.

I'm sure designers have taken this all into account, but I'd still be concerned with control systems for pedestrian avoidance, sensors determining whether the small object in front is a newspaper or a rock to be avoided, and predicting behaviors of bicyclists, etc. Sometimes its better to run over a squirrel than break suddenly and risk being rear-ended or swerve around it.

This interests me but purely from a technological and safety point of view. I work in aviation, most aircraft have some form of "autopilot" even if it just automatic stabilisation.

One of the rotary wing aircraft I work on had an analogue system (around 30 years old) that was capable of applying one third of the control required to correct in the time it took a human pilot to notice a percievable change in attitude.

A growing trend now is to assume that the computer is less likely to make a mistake than a h

This means that they'll abandon driverless cars in 2019. Then Toyota will start making them in 2020 and soon make even more money hand over fist. In 2022, GM while ask congress for a bail-out and claim it is "too expensive" to make a driverless car.

Surely, the best way to do it is to get you to the highway, at which point you join a lane (similar to the US carpool lane) that has a weak AM transmitter down the middle. Your car has a couple of sensors on the bottom, to make sure it stays in the middle, and just accelerates to it's highest economy setting.

Better yet, it could slip behind another cars slipstream and take the energy savings for granted. Half-second gaps between cars, with sensors in front and narrowbeam transmitters on the back to alert for stationary vehicles up ahead. Modulate that AM transmitter, and you've got yourself traffic information to plot a better route, and could be encrypted to prevent mis-use.

Why hasn't this been done? And if it has (even if a different system than AMRF) why hasn't it been implemented for economy long-distance driving?

Come on, what's holding them back? There are already warehouse trucks that drive automatically, avoiding obsticles, making cars do it is only a public awareness campaign away. With Galileo completed in 2013, I'd say thats a perfect year for this too. Maybe not in city streets, but on highways, why not? The technology is already there, we've see articles for years showing how it would work, and we already have cars with parts of these systems.

Just make the system, prove in some spectacular way how safe it is, and then sell it. I can't wait to see the movies where cars are pushed to their absolute limit to avoid a whole series of accidents, all of it happening too fast for a human to register.

Obviously, most countries will initially make sure this is illegal, but there will always be some small country that goes the other way just to be different, and the first manufacturer of these cars for that country will get some major publicity.

About as reliable as take-off and landing software on airplanes I'd say. Or perhaps communications links from the control tower to the plane. Don't take the unreliability of the consumer PC market as some unavoidable fact of life. Given limited scope and enough resources, reliable systems *can* and have been designed and built since the first engineers started tinkering with stuff.

There will be mistakes and deaths, but they will be far fewer than we have today.

I think you're right. The uncomfortable part, though, is that when you're driving the car, you feel that you have the control over avoiding problems and accidents (I say you *feel* because in reality, there are some accidents you can't avoid). On the other hand, if the software BSODs and drives you off the bridge, you had nothing to do with it at all. Every time you get into one of these cars, you're putting your life into the

WHY are these bozos spending money on this? Who needs running water?
Hey, Let me guess. The Saudis NEED running water when their wives, daughters, and girlfriends want to drink some and there is no male around to get it for them them.
Fair enough (for them). But why in the civilized world would anyone need running water? There's no shortage of people who would be happy to have a job filling buckets from a well for you if you don't want to do so yourself.
So why are they spending all this mon

I need a driverless car. I want to be able to sleep/study/play video games while on the road. I want the the perfect attention and instant response of a computer keeping me safe. And I don't want to pay someone to do it for me.

Seriously, how can you even ask this question? Have you ever heard of the broken window fallacy?

WHY are these bozos spending money on this? Who needs a driver-less car?Personally, I can't think of a single reason. [alcoholalert.com] I'm certain that all people everywhere will begin paying designated drivers rather than spend that last $20 on 3 more shots of Jager. Besides, these first models won't work perfectly which obviously means they never will. Such pie-in-the-sky endeavors should never even be considered.

Well, there is no need for traffic lights if all cars are robots. Of-course the humans have to cross, but this can be done with overpasses or tunnels under the streets.Once cars can really drive themselves, they should be in contact with other cars, road signs and such to maintain the best traffic conditions possible.There will be no real reason for stop signs, traffic lights, speed limits, yield signs and such, all of this can be avoided once cars are driving themselves.

Of-course this requires an overhaul of the infrastructure and assumes all cars are driverless and communicating with each other, the road signs and such and that there are no others (pedestrians/animals/other obstacles) on the roads.

I don't think that better fuel economy is neccesarily a given - cars currently support a very minimal set of electrics and on many cars there is no surplus of power - a lot of small european cars for example noticeably dim lights when electric windows are engaged.

There also comes the issue of redundancy which is not currently an issue, as well as the increased weight if the control components and sensors.

Actually, this may be part of that solution. For the most part the guy behind the wheel causes his own problems with gas mileage by driving like a 12 year old jackoff who's high on Jolt cola. In this age, the more control we take from the driver the better off we probably are. We'd exceed the 1 mpg/year claim that a lot of environmentalists make by getting Joe Sixpack to sit back and enjoy the nice music instead of having him ride the ass of the car in front

* Getting a computer to recognize the difference between a toddler crawling on the road, versus a doll on the road.This can be done, there are object classification algorithms that can make the determination, especially if the toddler is crawling.

* Seeing well in the rain.

This can be done using near-IR cameras, in fact they can see better than you probably could.

* Telling the difference between a dishwasher carton (which might not have to be bra